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The US has very localized housing problems. Many tech giants are realizing that they have to either diversify their locations or enter into a housing spiral, as

The US has very localized housing problems. Many tech giants are realizing that they have to either diversify their locations or enter into a housing spiral, as there just aren't enough houses for how many people they'd like to hire. Once you step out of a small number of markets, the price problem goes away. I live in a well sized metro in the midwest, and I've worked, from here, for companies you've heard about. 4 bedrooms in my street, sitting on half an acre and a decent school district, are $250k. A 1 bedroom apartment would be under a thousand a month to rent, and that's a modern building with good appliances, a gym, a pool and gigabit internet. A single person in tech, right out of school, can easily save enough to get a mortgage in their first year working. So yes, your situation is very real, but if there was less pressure to be in Seattle, NY or SF, the housing problems would melt.

nostrademons 6y ago
It's more that the price problem follows the workers. A decade ago, Seattle was cheap. You could get 4/5 BR homes in Kirkland for $400K. I just checked, and those homes are going for $1.2M now. Similarly, one of my former Google coworkers moved out to the Boulder office. When I'd checked on Boulder in the late 00s, you could get nice homes for $250-300K. He paid about $850K. Wherever you have highly paid tech workers, you will have highly paid tech workers bidding up houses. You just have to get ahead of them, and buy where the FAANG offices are just being constructed rather than wait until you work there. True remote work (where you could dial in from anywhere, not just a city near an office) would fix this, but that's not really what's being offered these days, and when it is the salaries are more inline with what people make in the Midwest than what they make in Silicon Valley.
asdff 6y ago
Pretty much any growing metro is experiencing a housing crisis because no where is building enough housing.

nostrademons 6y ago

It's more that the price problem follows the workers. A decade ago, Seattle was cheap. You could get 4/5 BR homes in Kirkland for $400K. I just checked, and those homes are going for $1.2M now. Similarly, one of my former Google coworkers moved out to the Boulder office. When I'd checked on Boulder in the late 00s, you could get nice homes for $250-300K. He paid about $850K. Wherever you have highly paid tech workers, you will have highly paid tech workers bidding up houses. You just have to get ahead of them, and buy where the FAANG offices are just being constructed rather than wait until you work there. True remote work (where you could dial in from anywhere, not just a city near an office) would fix this, but that's not really what's being offered these days, and when it is the salaries are more inline with what people make in the Midwest than what they make in Silicon Valley.

asdff 6y ago

Pretty much any growing metro is experiencing a housing crisis because no where is building enough housing.